Quality in Innovation

This post is my personal opinion and does not reflect the opinion of my employer... yadda, yadda...

I'm reading several books at the moment, one of which is the book to CMMi. This is basically deriving a vision for continuous process improvement in a company. But there are things seriously wrong with CMM. It is geared towards establishing a "static" state atmosphere, because if this were different, it would be very difficult to apply measurements across the process. A dynamic setting like an innovative powerhouse has severe problems adopting more rigid procedures due to the nature of their work. It is *not* a factory and they work with people that are intelligent and know what they are doing. Why insult them with procedures that tell them what to do, if they are the ones that know best?

The final level of the CMMi Zen approach is: "the optimizing level" :). I compare this to an engine room of a ship (I used to work in shipping).

This is where every process is defined and measured, you have all the spare parts you need, you have all the supplies you need and the ship hums along without a glitch. No leaking oil, no weird sounds, there are no bearings about to break or go. The chief engineer only walks around to tweak some settings on regulators for the form of it, puts his ear against a machine to hear its performance. It might tell the 2nd to replace a filter here or there or schedule an overhaul in the future, but overall the performance is so magnificent that everybody can go upstairs to the ship's bar. That's Zen, but software is pretty much different, especially when working on innovative and new products. Technology moves a *lot* faster in IT than it does in shipping. The speed at which new technology can be consumed on the ship is because they are users of that technology, not creators. And in software you may find yourself working on an embedded system to monitor cars first, subsequently followed by the latest technology in Ajax to create a project management system.

The later parts of my 729-page CMMi guide talks about "statistics" and "statistically managed subprocesses". Surely it must be evident that if you are not continuously repeating what you are doing, you are not building any historical data and thereby not creating the data necessary to improve your processes.

The real reason why it is so difficult to integrate with these quality visions is because in IT we are learning new things every day or encountering problems that are not standard. If I was working on a project with really new technology or bending the rules of what is possible with that technology, I would deserve a couple of days extra to find out ways and alternatives. I might choose a wrong alternative first and then have to rework. I might have to read through books of protocols in order to even start with architecture or coding. I may have people in the team that need to be trained.

Is a quality process that relies on repeatedness able to improve the quality of what I am doing?

....

I am not convinced!

( also check out http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Craftsmanship.html )